"Kodos for pyparsing"
Perhaps if I say it, with earnest conviction, it will come into existence. Perhaps if I intone it repeatedly; light a candle, maybe.
Or perhaps I will get around to creating the modification to Kodos myself. It might not even be too hard - it just can't be a priority project right now...
Kudos for pyparsing, too, of course.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
speaking at IOUG
Whoo! My talk got accepted at IOUG Collaborate!
Yay! I even got a good time slot!
This will be kind of like the talks I've given at Oracle user groups around here... but more polished, of course - as SQLPython itself is more polished.
Congratulations! Your Technical Session (60-minute) proposal below has been accepted by the IOUG Conference Committee for presentation at COLLABORATE 09 IOUG Forum. You are scheduled to present at the following date/time.
405: Long Live the Command Line: SQL*Plus and Alternatives
Thursday, May 7, 2009 from 11:00 AM until 12:00 PM
Yay! I even got a good time slot!
This will be kind of like the talks I've given at Oracle user groups around here... but more polished, of course - as SQLPython itself is more polished.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
account rot
I feel a gradually growing sense of nervousness and guilt over the growing trail of accounts I have opened on various web-based services, then abandoned. You know how it is... you try out a service, but 95% of the time you lose interest or find a better one eventually. Then your account just sits there forlornly, quietly counting the months since your last login.
I'd back up and delete the old accounts, but many of them don't provide convenient (or any) account deletion options, and most of them I have just plain forgotten.
What's the harm? Well, I do have a very young nth cousin named Catherine Devlin who is probably going to curse me in 15 years for squatting on her account name EVERYWHERE. Assuming she doesn't want to be "WebkinzBellybuttonLint" or something. Worse, there are just a couple sites where I got the username "catherine" - which is awesome, except when I ended up not using them, leaving a choice username to gather digital dust.
Plus, there's this feeling that any of those accounts is potentially crackable, creating risk of a very mild form of identity theft. OK, I don't care that much if somebody's leaving comments as me on IMDB, but it still doesn't seem quite right.
This is one thing I love OpenID for - my account at liquidID.net has a nice listing of everyplace I've used it. Alas, that represents maybe 0.1% of the services I've signed up for in the past 10 years.
Anybody have a solution? I should probably start a centralized record of all my newly created accounts, but what about the ones I've already forgotten?
I'd back up and delete the old accounts, but many of them don't provide convenient (or any) account deletion options, and most of them I have just plain forgotten.
What's the harm? Well, I do have a very young nth cousin named Catherine Devlin who is probably going to curse me in 15 years for squatting on her account name EVERYWHERE. Assuming she doesn't want to be "WebkinzBellybuttonLint" or something. Worse, there are just a couple sites where I got the username "catherine" - which is awesome, except when I ended up not using them, leaving a choice username to gather digital dust.
Plus, there's this feeling that any of those accounts is potentially crackable, creating risk of a very mild form of identity theft. OK, I don't care that much if somebody's leaving comments as me on IMDB, but it still doesn't seem quite right.
This is one thing I love OpenID for - my account at liquidID.net has a nice listing of everyplace I've used it. Alas, that represents maybe 0.1% of the services I've signed up for in the past 10 years.
Anybody have a solution? I should probably start a centralized record of all my newly created accounts, but what about the ones I've already forgotten?
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Planet CodeMash (Yahoo! Pipes)
When a product is described as, "Easy to use - requires no programming!", run. Run, and don't look back.
That's been my rule, anyway. After my first Yahoo! Pipes project, I'm willing to flex it... a little bit. It's been a blend of agony and ecstasy.
Dozens of CodeMash attendees have listed the URLs of their (human-readable) blogs on a webpage. I wanted to browse their blogs, but not by drilling into each one manually. I wanted to read them in one place, with a Planet CodeMash.
(Would you believe that I couldn't find an online "planetizing" website that would simply take a list like that and generate the planet for me? The closest I found was RSSMix, which wanted me to find the RSS URLs myself - which I did, with Python - but then it couldn't read Feedburner links.)
Enter Yahoo! Pipes. Voilà.
Yahoo! Pipes is good for problems like this where you get web-published data (not only RSS feeds, as I first believed), apply a series of transformations, and publish it.
You design your project by dragging logical blocks around a 2-D graphical flowsheet, with pretty curvey lines connecting them. The modules are well-chosen to provide a fair amount of versatility despite their limited number. I was happy to find a Regex module, as well as Feed Auto-Discovery, which drills into a page and finds its RSS link - perfect for this project.
There are problems, however. The biggest one is that, since the editor runs in your web browser, there are some... annoying... ... lags. Every time you click on anything, it takes a second or two for your click to register. That's more than annoying; when you need to click-and-drag, it's nearly crippling. If you can sit there with your finger on the mouse button, wondering, "Has my click registered? Can I drag yet?", again and again, and not curse somebody, then you're a wonderful person.
Of course, every new environment seems a bit confusing and wrong until you've had a chance to poke all the buttons and twiddle the knobs - but this painful interface pretty much prevents playful exploration, so the environment will remain alien and full of surprises for a long time,
Oh, and the error messages stink. "Oops: System error. Problem parsing response." Gee, thanks.
Still, I did get it done, in a halfway reasonable amount of time, and the result is undeniably pretty.
I will consider Yahoo! Pipes for future projects like this. And if I ever find a way to run its editor locally, it will probably become one of my favorite toys.
That's been my rule, anyway. After my first Yahoo! Pipes project, I'm willing to flex it... a little bit. It's been a blend of agony and ecstasy.
Dozens of CodeMash attendees have listed the URLs of their (human-readable) blogs on a webpage. I wanted to browse their blogs, but not by drilling into each one manually. I wanted to read them in one place, with a Planet CodeMash.
(Would you believe that I couldn't find an online "planetizing" website that would simply take a list like that and generate the planet for me? The closest I found was RSSMix, which wanted me to find the RSS URLs myself - which I did, with Python - but then it couldn't read Feedburner links.)
Enter Yahoo! Pipes. Voilà.
Planet CodeMash
Yahoo! Pipes is good for problems like this where you get web-published data (not only RSS feeds, as I first believed), apply a series of transformations, and publish it.
You design your project by dragging logical blocks around a 2-D graphical flowsheet, with pretty curvey lines connecting them. The modules are well-chosen to provide a fair amount of versatility despite their limited number. I was happy to find a Regex module, as well as Feed Auto-Discovery, which drills into a page and finds its RSS link - perfect for this project.
There are problems, however. The biggest one is that, since the editor runs in your web browser, there are some... annoying... ... lags. Every time you click on anything, it takes a second or two for your click to register. That's more than annoying; when you need to click-and-drag, it's nearly crippling. If you can sit there with your finger on the mouse button, wondering, "Has my click registered? Can I drag yet?", again and again, and not curse somebody, then you're a wonderful person.
Of course, every new environment seems a bit confusing and wrong until you've had a chance to poke all the buttons and twiddle the knobs - but this painful interface pretty much prevents playful exploration, so the environment will remain alien and full of surprises for a long time,
Oh, and the error messages stink. "Oops: System error. Problem parsing response." Gee, thanks.
Still, I did get it done, in a halfway reasonable amount of time, and the result is undeniably pretty.
I will consider Yahoo! Pipes for future projects like this. And if I ever find a way to run its editor locally, it will probably become one of my favorite toys.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
gift idea and hot investment tip
Yay for Python 3.0! You knew I had to say that. I'm not actually using 3.0 or even 2.6 very seriously yet, though Brandon Rhodes showed me how to use comprehension for dictionaries, and that's just awesome. So I'm going to try to switch as soon as cx_Oracle and pyparsing are ready.
Anyway, I do have one more nontechnical thing I've just got to talk about. I want to do some free advertising for Microplace, a microcredit investment site. I discovered them a few months ago and was delighted with how smooth and easy they made it to place a microcredit investment. It was as professionally done as a good bank's site, and there is enormous choice in where you want your investment to go.
They're also doing a promotion right now where they'll give you a handmade piggy bank! I got one unexpectedly about a month ago, and I absolutely love it.
The picture really doesn't do it justice - it's delightfully cute. More, the tactile and audio sensation of plunking a coin into it is just... astonishingly satisfying. It's just exactly the way a piggy bank should look, feel, and sound, the Platonic ideal of "piggy bank". I find a nickel under the couch cushions and I practically dance over to the bank to plunk it in. I'm going to get another for my nephew for Christmas. This is what you should get somebody for Christmas (or any other gift-giving occasion).
Obviously, from an investor's point of view, microcredit sucks. The interest rate probably won't even keep up with inflation. That's OK. This is not serious capitalism; this is more like making a loan to a friend in need. I like it that way. Generally, what we hope to buy with money is satisfaction anyway - buying stuff we hope will satisfy us. If I put $200 in a standard investment for a couple years, maybe it would earn me enough to go see a movie, and maybe the movie would be satisfying. But the thought that the money is actually hard at work in somebody's life - that's vastly more satisfying, in my book. (I also find it a handy way to squirrel away little self-earmarked savings funds. If I intend to put aside $100 toward a future bathroom remodeling, but I put it into my regular savings account, I am really bad at keeping track of my specific intention for that money; it just vanishes into the ebb and flow of funds. But it's easy to remember that the $100 investment to Tanzania has a specific purpose.)
Anyway, I do have one more nontechnical thing I've just got to talk about. I want to do some free advertising for Microplace, a microcredit investment site. I discovered them a few months ago and was delighted with how smooth and easy they made it to place a microcredit investment. It was as professionally done as a good bank's site, and there is enormous choice in where you want your investment to go.
They're also doing a promotion right now where they'll give you a handmade piggy bank! I got one unexpectedly about a month ago, and I absolutely love it.
The picture really doesn't do it justice - it's delightfully cute. More, the tactile and audio sensation of plunking a coin into it is just... astonishingly satisfying. It's just exactly the way a piggy bank should look, feel, and sound, the Platonic ideal of "piggy bank". I find a nickel under the couch cushions and I practically dance over to the bank to plunk it in. I'm going to get another for my nephew for Christmas. This is what you should get somebody for Christmas (or any other gift-giving occasion).
Obviously, from an investor's point of view, microcredit sucks. The interest rate probably won't even keep up with inflation. That's OK. This is not serious capitalism; this is more like making a loan to a friend in need. I like it that way. Generally, what we hope to buy with money is satisfaction anyway - buying stuff we hope will satisfy us. If I put $200 in a standard investment for a couple years, maybe it would earn me enough to go see a movie, and maybe the movie would be satisfying. But the thought that the money is actually hard at work in somebody's life - that's vastly more satisfying, in my book. (I also find it a handy way to squirrel away little self-earmarked savings funds. If I intend to put aside $100 toward a future bathroom remodeling, but I put it into my regular savings account, I am really bad at keeping track of my specific intention for that money; it just vanishes into the ebb and flow of funds. But it's easy to remember that the $100 investment to Tanzania has a specific purpose.)
Monday, December 01, 2008
a viral Bible campaign
A different topic today, though still with an open-source tie-in.
I've never seen anybody offering free audiobook CDs of the Bible. The only audiobook Bibles I've ever seen were actually kind of expensive.
How come? Unless you live on Mars, somebody has thrust a free paper Bible into your hands at least once in your life. Yet, if you drive a car, you have sometimes stooped to listening to painfully worthless crud on the radio just to alleviate the boredom of driving. If you'd had an audiobook Bible, you probably would have listened to it, if only for your cultural education.
Yet a bit of websearching suggests that, holy cow, this actually hasn't been done yet. Am I wrong?
Probably one reason is that the only well-known translation that isn't strictly copyrighted is the King James Version, which is perfect if you intend to do outreach to 17th-century England. No CD players there, though, so it's not so useful for this purpose.
Alas that all the well-known translation committees apparently preceded or were unaware of the open-source/creative-commons movement. Especially since, you know, Jesus did kind of INVENT the GPL for crying out loud. And explicitly applied it to his teaching. Hello. "Freely you have received; freely give".
Anyway, there is, fortunately, one English translation that is freely distributable, the World English Version, and one site that's done voice recordings of it, audiotreasure.
So here's a plan for a viral campaign.
1. Make up a master audio CD from audiotreasure's MP files. I'm really not ambitious enough to try for more than one CD's worth, so I hope at least the Gospel of Mark will fit. If not, make a new recording with someonewhotalksreallyfast. Or something.
2. Compose a nice CD label. Include the URL (#4)
3. Write a nice letter asking permission to distribute the CDs without charge from places where you find bored drivers: fast-food restaurants, truck stops, etc.
4. Set up a website with the files from #1-3, and instructions on how anybody else can do step #5, becoming another viral site of distribution. It looks like you can make a homemade, home-labelled CD for $0.25 or less, so anybody with a computer can make a hundred or two with a modest commitment.
5. Burn some CDs, label them, get permission and distribute them.
6. Hopefully, others join in and the campaign spreads...
7. Profit! Oh, wait, I guess not.
I'm excited. I plan to do this. I wonder if I can get CDs out there by Christmas? However, if you move faster than me and want to set up the seed site, go for it!
I'm sure the Gideons would have started this years ago, if only their grandkids had taught them how. (I'm teasing! Hey, if any Gideons or similar groups should read this, yes of COURSE you can use the idea.)
I've never seen anybody offering free audiobook CDs of the Bible. The only audiobook Bibles I've ever seen were actually kind of expensive.
How come? Unless you live on Mars, somebody has thrust a free paper Bible into your hands at least once in your life. Yet, if you drive a car, you have sometimes stooped to listening to painfully worthless crud on the radio just to alleviate the boredom of driving. If you'd had an audiobook Bible, you probably would have listened to it, if only for your cultural education.
Yet a bit of websearching suggests that, holy cow, this actually hasn't been done yet. Am I wrong?
Probably one reason is that the only well-known translation that isn't strictly copyrighted is the King James Version, which is perfect if you intend to do outreach to 17th-century England. No CD players there, though, so it's not so useful for this purpose.
Alas that all the well-known translation committees apparently preceded or were unaware of the open-source/creative-commons movement. Especially since, you know, Jesus did kind of INVENT the GPL for crying out loud. And explicitly applied it to his teaching. Hello. "Freely you have received; freely give".
Anyway, there is, fortunately, one English translation that is freely distributable, the World English Version, and one site that's done voice recordings of it, audiotreasure.
So here's a plan for a viral campaign.
1. Make up a master audio CD from audiotreasure's MP files. I'm really not ambitious enough to try for more than one CD's worth, so I hope at least the Gospel of Mark will fit. If not, make a new recording with someonewhotalksreallyfast. Or something.
2. Compose a nice CD label. Include the URL (#4)
3. Write a nice letter asking permission to distribute the CDs without charge from places where you find bored drivers: fast-food restaurants, truck stops, etc.
4. Set up a website with the files from #1-3, and instructions on how anybody else can do step #5, becoming another viral site of distribution. It looks like you can make a homemade, home-labelled CD for $0.25 or less, so anybody with a computer can make a hundred or two with a modest commitment.
5. Burn some CDs, label them, get permission and distribute them.
6. Hopefully, others join in and the campaign spreads...
7. Profit! Oh, wait, I guess not.
I'm excited. I plan to do this. I wonder if I can get CDs out there by Christmas? However, if you move faster than me and want to set up the seed site, go for it!
I'm sure the Gideons would have started this years ago, if only their grandkids had taught them how. (I'm teasing! Hey, if any Gideons or similar groups should read this, yes of COURSE you can use the idea.)
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